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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
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Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.
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Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.
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It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
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All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
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There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
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To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
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We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
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He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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The age of miracles is forever here.
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Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
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Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.
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Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.